The Advanced CSM Course (A-CSM)

April 14, 2018

The main goal of the course is to help you become more effective so you can then help your team and organization improve faster, and improve significantly — such as to 5-10x more Velocity with higher quality and more fun for the team.

The specific rules of the A-CSM course requires us to spend most of time assessing students on whether they have mastered the “Learning Objectives.”

I think the A-CSM course is a great step forward! It is not a panacea — it will not do magic by itself — but it can help you and your team and your organization become a LOT better if you use it well.

The good news is this: While you will have to study and experiment and learn on your own some, you can come to the class before you are fully confident you will pass the assessment. And, by being assessed (through many exercises), you will learn, and you will also learn by watching others be assessed.

There will be no lecture and no spoon-fed learning. We will offer some comments along the way, on each Learning Objective.

You will be assessed in mainly these ways:

Materials you present before the class starts

Reading you do before the class starts

Exercises in class

Role plays in class

Mini case studies you present

Again, as you do these and as you see others do these, you will learn.

Here are the Learning Objectives. As you can start to imagine, learning these will make you much more effective.

How high is the bar set?

This is hard to explain. I expect you to be in the top 30 percent of people in Scrum with one year of experience. I do not expect you to be perfect. I do not expect you to be as good as Jeff Sutherland. I do not expect you to be equally good in each Learning Objective. My guess is that I will initially fail 40 percent of the students.

What if I fail?

Well, no one is perfect, so in some sense, all could be said to fail. But more concretely, we do expect that some will not pass the first time.

What if I do not pass?

We expect you will now understand “the bar” far better after taking the course. You will study, experience and learn. You may come back in about two+ months, and we expect that almost everyone will pass the second time.

Our course will be different in several ways.

We will do it over three days. It will include our Agile Release Planning Workshop, but with the expectation that you will teach parts of it, and that you will be able to do it at a higher level. For those of you not experienced with our ARP workshop, it is an extended set of work with a “team” at your table working on real work (although perhaps the work is only truly real to one person at that table).